Fresh Ribs and Old Ribbons
by DracoOmega
Summary: Marisa has grown accustomed to Rumia dropping by whenever she's cooking, but an innocent gesture towards the little youkai nearly causes their meal to end in disaster and Marisa is left to figure out how to set things right.
It wasn't often that Marisa cooked for herself. As one who had mastered the art of freeloading, there was rarely much need; it's not like she could really compete with Alice or Sakuya when it came to a well-cooked meal, anyway. But sometimes you wanted to get your own hands dirty. And sometimes you'd just come into possession of a fresh rack of succulent pork ribs and the usual suspects were nowhere to be found. And so Marisa was barbequing.

"Their loss," she said to no one in particular, spreading the meat across the grill with a skewer. The grill itself was a simple affair of iron and stone, barely more than a glorified fire pit really, nestled behind the back of that ramshackle dwelling she called home. It probably needed cleaning.

She scraped a bit of carbonized residue off the grill with the skewer. Okay, it _definitely_ needed cleaning, although if anyone had asked, she'd have claimed that the memories of old meals just made new ones taste better. Maybe that was even true?

"Oh, right, the onions."

Marisa turned to brave the chaos one might generously call her pantry, but was stopped short by a familiar voice emanating from a nearby bush.

"What'cha cooking?"

Marisa let out a snort and shook her head. Figures she'd show up. This was the _good_ stuff she was cooking, after all. She put on her best smile.

"Butabara! Want some?" It was pointless to try and refuse her, she'd learned, and besides, meals were better shared, anyway. Sometimes even with strange youkai.

"Hooray!" Rumia burst forth from the bush with her arms spread wide and a carefree smile on her face. She always looked that way when food was involved. Marisa had actually started to suspect she had some kind of youkai sixth sense for cooked meat. Or maybe just a really, really good sense of smell.

...best not to dwell on the implications of that one.

"It looks delicious."

Marisa grinned. "Of course it does! What kinda magician would I be if I couldn't even grill something properly? I'll have you know I'm a master at grilling things." And there's _definitely_ nothing toxic in it this time. Probably.

Rumia licked her lips and reached a hand towards the sizzling pork.

"Hey, it's not cooked yet. It'll be another few-"

It was no use. The barely cooked pork was already between the youkai's teeth and being chewed vigorously, a thin trickle of raw juices dribbling out the corner of her mouth; table manners never _were_ her strong suit.

Marisa shrugged and smiled and went back to tending the grill. Better she be here eating half-raw pork than all-raw human somewhere else, after all.

The first time Rumia had showed up unannounced, Marisa had left her face-down in the forest's newest crater. You never trust the man-eaters; that's rule number one. But, for whatever crazy reason, the little youkai kept coming back, and always with that innocent smile on her face, like she'd forgotten all about what happened last time. Eventually, Marisa had come to realize she was more interested in the meat she was _cooking_ than the meat still attached to her bones. And so having her as an uninvited guest whenever she was grilling had become something of a tradition. Perhaps it was the youkai's reckless disregard for personal safety, or her brazen sense of entitlement to other people's stuff, but Marisa had come to like the little munchkin – a strange sort of kinship between one freeloader and another.

And unlike a _certain magician_ , she never accused Marisa of trying to poison people. You get your mushrooms mixed up _one time_ , and nobody ever lets you forget it...

"Hey." Marisa stared at Rumia for a moment and frowned. "You've got a twig stuck in your hair, y'know." Must have come from that bush she was in; there were even some leaves still attached to it. Why did she spend so much time in bushes, anyway?

"I do?" Rumia swatted ineffectually at her own head, succeeding mostly in smearing pork juice across her cheek. Not that the gesture would have accomplished much even if it had been aimed at the correct side of her head.

"I said a _twig_ , not a mosquito," Marisa laughed. "Here, let me get it for you."

She bent down and gently pulled at the wayward branch. Rumia's hair moved with it. She pulled again. This time Rumia's entire head moved.

"Uh, sorry."

Rumia just kept on munching her half-cooked butabara.

 _At least she's being a good sport about this_ , Marisa thought as she held the youkai's head in place more firmly and tried wiggling the twig instead. The narrow end of it snapped cleanly off, but this only made the rest of it harder to grip.

"Man, how did you even manage to get it _this_ tangled?"

"Rumia's hair is really thick. And bushes are mean."

"I hear that." Marisa had landed face-first in too many thorny briars to argue otherwise. She examined the stubborn twig more carefully. "Actually... I think it's caught under your hair ribbon. Here, let me just untie it real quick."

As Marisa fumbled for the tie in Rumia's hair ornament, it occurred to her that she'd never seen the youkai without it – not once. Do youkai ever get tired of having the same hairstyle, decade after decade? Even Marisa owned more than one color of hat, and that was practically a trademark of hers at this point.

Actually, how was this thing even attached? It seemed knotted awfully securely for a hair ribbon; wouldn't that make it kind of uncomfortable to wear?

"Oh, there we go." Marisa's fingers finally worked their way inside the knot and popped it and she tugged the ribbon loose at last. And then several things happened very quickly.

There was a snapping sound, a brief flash, and a whiff of acrid smoke, followed by a terrible wailing. And then everything grew very, very dark.

"You broke it." Rumia's voice was clipped, mirthless. It sounded very unlike her.

"Well, I uh... I, er... mayb-"

"You broke it." Louder, unsteady.

"I didn't- I mean I didn't _mean_ to- I mean who would-"

"You." The was a moment of complete silence, followed by a single footstep. "You... you big meanie!"

The darkness was abruptly punctuated by the sound of danmaku being sprayed wildly.

"Ow, ow, ow!" Marisa clutched her shin and scrambled to the left. Another bullet clipped her in the shoulder. How were you supposed to dodge stuff you can't even see? That had to be against the rules.

"Calm down, Rumia! It was only an old ribbon. You don't need to make such a big deal about it, hey? I'll get you a new one. Any color you like! How's that sound?" Being friends with a seamstress had its advantages.

"I don't want a new one! That was Rumia's precious ribbon. It was special! One of a kind! And you broke it, you big meanie!"

Another barrage knocked Marisa's hat clean off as she scurried to avoid the bullets by sound alone. Okay, new strategy.

"I can fix it!" How do you even fix a broken ribbon? "Alice can fix it!"

More danmaku impacted around her, rustling through leaves and thudding against tree trunks, some of them scarcely within earshot. At least the upside of it being so dark that Marisa couldn't dodge is that Rumia couldn't _aim_ , either. Did that make this contest more equitable or just a complete mess?

"I'll even throw in some extra butabara!" Desperate times call for desperate measures. "Whaddya say?"

"I don't want your stupid butabara! I want my ribbon back!"

Did Rumia really just refuse fresh meat? Okay, this was _serious_.

As another bullet whizzed past Marisa's face, she quickly ran through her options. Under ordinary circumstances, beating Rumia in a duel would be child's play. There was just one very large, cottage-shaped problem: it was pitch black and she no longer knew which direction her house was in. Even if Marisa's usual response to accusations of collateral damage was to smirk incorrigibly, _this was her house_. She _liked_ her house, thank you very much!

There was a sharp clang and a sound like the clattering of stones. Something sizzled and smoldered; a whiff of wood smoke started to rise on the wind.

"Oh crap, the grill!" One of Rumia's projectiles must have sent part of it flying. Something was burning that wasn't supposed to be burning. Was it the house!? Please say it wasn't the house.

One way or another, she needed to get that ball of darkness away from here _now_. If that wasn't her house on fire, it was one of the trees _next_ to her house and both of those scenarios ended in tragedy. Rocketing through the woods when you can't see the trees is a good way to crack your skull open, so that only left going up. At least Rumia was generating enough noise to make her easy to find.

"Ah hell." Marisa gritted her teeth and dashed for the center of the commotion, danmaku slamming into her torso and limbs as she did so. Some of those were going to leave bruises in the morning... She felt her fingers brush against Rumia's dress and then, with more finesse than she expected, tumbled forward and scooped the little youkai up in her arms. And then...

Honestly, she'd just planned to take flight and drag Rumia a safe distance away from her home so that she could blast her in peace and go deal with this new emergency. But for some reason she found herself pulling the youkai tight against her chest and enfolding her in a hug instead.

Rumia was sobbing. Marisa hadn't realized it until now, drowned out as it was by the sound of danmaku battering her yard, but Rumia was sobbing. You can't just _shoot_ somebody you made cry like that, youkai or no youkai.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's okay." Marisa stroked Rumia's hair as though she were holding a frightened child in her arms. In a sense, she supposed she was. "I'll make it better, I promise! Ow!"

A pang of genuine alarm shot through Marisa when she felt Rumia's teeth sink into her shoulder. A youkai's fangs can be savagely sharp when they want them to be, and she'd let her defenses drop completely. It was a rookie mistake; she wouldn't be the first human who'd gotten themselves eaten because they were too trusting, after all. But even though Rumia might have drawn blood, there was no force behind the bite. Instead, she just kept whimpering into Marisa's chest, her words muffled by leaving her mouth mashed against her shoulder.

"Marisa, you big dummy."

The magician rubbed the back of her head and tried not to wince. "Yeah, guilty as charged. Now can you turn the lights back on, already? I think my house is gonna burn down."

As it turned out, the only thing on fire was the base of a single tree and a few bits of brush around it; nothing that a couple hasty buckets of water couldn't fix. The ribbon was a bigger problem. The two halves that Marisa had retrieved barely looked like cloth anymore – all shrivelled and singed along the edges. It was impossible this was just physical damage.

"Well, of course," Alice said. "It _was_ a talisman, and a very old one, and you unbound it. I'm surprised it remained intact for as long as it did, to be honest."

"So... does that mean you can fix it? Or that you can't fix it?"

Alice looked at the scraps of the ribbon and sighed. Then she looked at Marisa's insufferable grin and sighed harder. That meddlesome magician knew damn well she wasn't going to claim ineptitude when it came to fabric repairs. No matter what kind of unreasonable bother this was going to be to get come out right. One doesn't just _fix_ expended talismans.

"Of course I can fix it."

"Thanks, Alice." Marisa's smile was as genuine as it was self-assured. Somehow that only made it more vexing. "I owe you one."

"Eleven, actually. But who's counting?"

If Rumia actually had a place she called home, Marisa had no idea where to find it. So instead she just put on another round of butabara the next day; that was _basically_ like inviting her over at this point, wasn't it?

Alice had done a wonderful job with the ribbon. Marisa wasn't sure what magic she'd worked on it (and would almost certainly have to pester her for the details later), but it looked as good as new. Maybe even better.

"But not too much better, I hope." It did have to pass for the original, after all; youkai can be very particular about their possessions.

Right on cue, a mop of blond hair poked out from behind a tree. The pork had just started sizzling, after all. Wouldn't want to wait for it to be actually _cooked_ ; that would just be silly.

"Something smells good." Rumia seemed in better spirits than the last time they'd met, though her hair looked oddly naked without that splash of red in it.

Marisa smiled. "I believe," she began in a solemn voice, twirling the newly-whole ribbon around her finger, "that I have a present for you."

As far as Marisa was concerned, the gleam in Rumia's eyes in that moment made it all worth it. She bounded over to Marisa's side like one who had never known a single worry in their life and smiled so broadly that the rest of her face threatened to vanish altogether. Maybe she _was_ a man-eating youkai, but it still felt like doing a good deed.

"Here, let me put it on for you."

The rest of the evening passed as any good meal should, with laughter and smiles and absolutely nothing catching on fire. Marisa cracked open a bottle of cheap sake and they were both several cups deep by the time the two of them polished off the last of the pork.

"Well, that was pretty darn tasty, if I do say so myself." Marisa patted her stomach contently.

"It was!" Rumia took another sip of sake and then gave Marisa a cryptic look. "You know, you tasted pretty good, too. Is it okay if I eat you when you're done moving around?"

Marisa laughed. "I'll have you know I plan to still be moving around a thousand years from now."

"If you became a youkai, that would just spoil the taste completely. So don't do that."

"So you can eat me?"

"Yup!" Rumia's smile was the picture of innocence. She _was_ kidding, right?

...she probably wasn't kidding, actually.

Marisa shrugged expressively and shook her head. The food tonight was too good to waste time worrying about stuff like that. "How about you check back in a couple centuries, hey? We can work out the details later."

"Okay!"

 _How did I ever get used to this?_ Marisa wondered as she raised her sake cup and tipped it in Rumia's direction. The youkai returned the gesture.

"Cheers!"

* * *

 _(Note: Originally written as prompt fill for Marisa+Rumia+'Unintended Consequences')_


End file.
